Hard-wired politics: what about changers?
New York magazine’s Sasha Issenberg has a weak article on a topic that interests me, the difference between liberals and conservatives, and whether it’s hard-wired.
In it, he (and some of the researchers he quotes) not only displays the typical stereotypes about right and left, but shows a good deal of ignorance about what would constitute strong evidence for nature in the nature-nurture fight. Most interestingly of all, for me, is that fact that he also ignores the formidable problem that changers such as yours truly present to anyone who would consider politics to be hard-wired. Did we changers all get updated wiring in mid-life?
The phenomenon is dismissed this way:
Rare midlife conversions aside, our parties are groups of two different kinds of people, [certain researchers] said, divided not by class or geography or education but by temperament.
Rare? Not really. It may be somewhat rare to change at the advanced age I did, but I’ve certainly come across the phenomenon time and again. More importantly, such conversions are actually pretty standard in early adulthood, as in the famous observation (sometimes attributed to Churchill), “A man who isn’t a liberal at 20 has no heart, and a man who isn’t a conservative at 40 has no head.”
Personally, I think nurture has a great, great deal to do with politics, although I would imagine that basic personality types (including where one falls on the heart/head continuum) come into play too. So do gender, age, and the ability to gather and process information. But it’s not a simple heart/head thing either; I know quite a few liberals with very formidable powers of thinking and analysis, and quite a few conservatives who lack them—and of course the opposite as well, people who conform to the standard “liberals who feel and conservatives who think” dichotomy.
I’d say that life experiences matter just as much. I was quite the liberal in my college days and even helped organize the MD delegation for the first million person march against homelessness way back when.
However, about 5 years later, I stumbled into my own business which wound up being relatively successful. Since then I got the entrepreneurial bug and have started other companies. As a business owner, my entire perspective on what I had felt were hard truths radically changed. Now I see myself as a libertarian minded conservative. Interestingly, my wife, who grew up in an extremely liberal household and who was quite liberal 15 years ago, has also moved to the right to an extent her parents find shocking. Her conversion also coincided with her day-to-day management of our businesses.
Obviously, our sample size is extremely small, but if a person’s political persuasion were hardwired, I don’t see how we would have so changed our own political philosophies.
I do not see the difference as being hard-wired. I have read that the difference between conservatives and liberals is that liberals see paradise as in the future, while conservatives see paradise as being in the past.
I’m not from New York and quit paying to read New York and The New Yorker some twenty years ago because 1) their articles are dreck, and 2) I had no need to know theater, concert and museum schedules. I avoid them like the plague.
But why limit the issue of hard-wiredness to Libs v. Cons? Why not Black v. White, or Women v. Men? Larry Summers raised such a question, once, and it cost him his Haavaad presidency. And a sometime writer for NRO just did, in effect, and Bingo! he’s out.
I am obviously not a social historian, but the shift in Blackness changed profoundly 50 years ago, and that settles the nature-nurture question there for me.
For the Left, the issue is limited to why they cannot convert Cons to their own mind set.
Whoops: “I avoid them” means the publications, not concerts, etc.
Part of the benefit to describing the Lib/Con as innate and hardwired is you can begin to de-humanize your opponent and treat Cons as “Other” and sub-human.
Let us not forget that Eugenics and Social Darwinism are ideas champions by the Progressives.
The Left longs for a final solution to the problem of the Right.
How would hard wiring explain geographic patterns of political orientation — say Vermont vs. Texas?
I can only speak from anecdotal experience but I’ve known of few to none who have switched from conservative to liberal, (say after 30) whereas many, including myself have trodden the same path as neo’s.
If many “conservatives are liberals who’ve been mugged” then it is in an unavoidable (physical, philosophical, etc) confrontation with reality, wherein the change lies.
And there’s nothing about reality which would lead one to believe that us all singing Kumbaya around the campfire is going to address man’s ‘inhumanity to man’.
I have a pet theory that the liberal, conservative divide centers upon the right-left brain split in human beings and a focus upon one side or the other. If the left side is the linear logical side and the right side the ‘artistic’ side, it would appear that they well match the two sides of the debate.
Of course people use both sides and some are particularly well balanced (integrated?) in their use of both sides but in general many appear to favor one or the other.
This hypothesis should be something easily verified if true. Just google right/brain test and you can easily determine which side you favor. I’m willing to bet that those frequenting this blog would heavily favor the left side of the brain and that the Huffington post’s readers, the right side.
I’m a left brain user and my creativity centers around linear extension and looking for hidden connections.
Seems to me that “hardwired” politics appeals to the same crowd that think sexuality is hardwired, and for the same reasons; it means people aren’t responsible for their actions, they are just born that way.
GB, I agree that you are on to something with this.
There’s an interesting book, “MY STROKE OF INSIGHT” by Jill Bolte Taylor, in which Dr. Taylor describes a stroke that disabled only her left brain. She eventually recovered and because she is a brain scientist, she took on the job of writing in detail about her experience of being exclusively right brained. It was a period of intense feeling in which colors, sounds, and objects were experienced more as intense feelings rather than separate, defined things. She could feel herself as being without boundaries and as being an integral part of the entire universe. It was a very spiritual sort of experience. Which leads me conclude that our right brain is our connection to our spiritual side
It seems to me that her experience shows that the right brain is overwhelmingly about feelings. Those who tend to be more right brained are less likely to follow evidence to a conclusion that doesn’t “feel” right. The differences that this causes in our government may well be one of those obstacles that we humans must somehow solve if we are to go forward as a free nation. We are so deeply divided now it is very difficult to take the necessary decisions in solving our fiscal and economic problems. It may be why all nations reach an apex and then slowly decay.
One more thing about the right brain/left brain thing: The feelings that the right brainers respond to may not be related to the issue they are discussing. It may have to do with the positive feedback they receive or have received from others on their side. How many women who watch the View really go out and try to gain more experience to test the received widom. I bet most just like to think that being in the Barbara Walters club is enough. They belong to the right group, and they will echo her positions even if they don’t care about them.
I think left brainers are probably less worried about what others think and are more willing to test positions. They are probably also more willing to separate and prioritize issues.
And then, of course, we have the no brainers.
Why are not all leftbrainers right-handed?
I’m a professional artist, dedicated math geek and writer. I’ve tested pretty strongly on both halves of the brain, and I’m a staunch conservative. Maybe I’m bucking a trend, but I’m not sure the brain split is the root of things here. I’d certainly not attribute the dichotomies to mere physiology, and emotions need not inevitably lead to whacked out liberal looniness.
Tesh is right. It is not nearly so simple. Let’s consider a stellar metaphor, which is described by a constellation of weighted vectors representing our predisposition on any number of significant issues. It is the sum of these vectors, which determine our character. Unfortunately, to complicate the analysis further, both the weight and direction can and do change throughout our life, but their dynamics are decidedly more constrained as we age. It is these numerous and temporal inflections which are most obviously associated with an objective recognition of individual dignity. As we form ever closer associations, and larger cooperatives, these singular peculiarities tend to coalesce as we necessarily align our frames of reference.
I would offer that the primary differentiating factor that separates liberals from pretty much every other political group is an exceptionally low “WQ” — The “Wisdom” equivalent of “IQ” — if “Intelligence” is the ability to learn from books, and “Wisdom” is the ability to learn from experience, then liberals have a vastly higher chance to be Widiots and Wmorons, on the far lower end of the Wisdom bell curve.
They simply cannot learn from experience.
This is where you get people like Noam Chomsky, clearly a brilliant man in the IQ department but a total fool in the Wisdom arena.
If you consider this, it explains a lot — their love for socialist/communist/collectivist ideas, for example… no matter how many times the ideas screw up, they just like the ideas sooooo much that it’s just a matter of “doing it right” and “tweaking something” to make it work.
A wise, sensible person might try it a few times, then grasp that there is something at the heart of it which causes it to fail no matter how careful you approach it.
…This would not be a Liberal.
And this is where converts like Neo lie — they are brought to liberalism by nurture, but, having a decent innate measure of common sense and wisdom, they eventually get enough experience to see the flaws behind the ideas and convert.
It also deals with the quip about 20yo vs. 40yo — as you gain experience, your positions should shift, if you’re learning from them.
There are other relevant qualities — Liberals tend to be like self-centered children always living in the eternal “NOW”, as well…. which is how some of them remain Widiots, never, ever seeing things from a mature (i.e., “experienced”) view outside of themselves… but the wisdom thing is The Big One.
Allow me to ask a simple question — how many people convert from Right to Left as they mature and grow older?
I’m sure it does happen, but what are the percentages going each way?
Hmmmm????
Met some folks in college, one of whom required a pardon from BJ Clinton due to her youthful escapades.
My judgement of them, from a long way off, is that they had daddy issues. That is, they thought there was an all-powerful figure who controlled everything. They didn’t think it rationally, but that was their world view. If something bad was happening, daddy could fix it. If it continued, it was because daddy wanted it to continue.
The most powerful man in the world is the US president. So if something bad is happening, the president either wants it–if he’s a republican–or if he’s a dem, he doesn’t want it but is hamstrung by a powerful cabal of republicans.
That sometimes shit just happens simply cannot be conceived by them. That what is happening might not be so bad except it gives them a chance to exercise unfocuse compassion doesn’t occur to them. That it might be the best of all alternatives is absolutely anathema.
That they might have made an error is, of course, quite impossible.
I must be an oddity, I was conservative at 20,conservative at 40 and conservative at 60.
Guess I was heartless then..or in an MOS that had no room for “feeling”
Dave.
Likewise. 11B10 and 71542.
Anyway, one of the strange items about the folks who were here all along is they get to write no books, nor get much credit. Apparently you have to switch to demonstrate intellectual abilities.
IGotBupkis, I’ve identified the same juvenile protest against life’s essential unfairness in liberals too, it’s certainly a dynamic though whether its the determinative one, who can say?
Tesh, you sound like one of those fortunate enough to be well integrated in your use of both sides. Personal anecdote can’t however, be reliably extended to the population at large.
n.n, your take is facile enough and may well be valid but I can’t help but get the impression that you’re so busy identifying the individual trees, as to have lost sight of the forest. Perhaps I’m being obtuse but detail springs from operative principles, not the reverse.
It is necessary to distinguish between conservatism in principle, and the American variant specifically. American conservatism is defined by an embrace of classical liberal philosophy tempered by Judeo-Christian principles. Most notable is the principal recognition of individual dignity and the compromises which follow from it. There is also a notable, but not entirely unique predisposition to embrace the sanctity of human life. This is clearly evident in other cultures, and reflects a willing acceptance of the primary tenet of the natural order, procreation (a principal of evolutionary fitness). A prerequisite for the stable realization of American conservative philosophy are individuals capable of self-moderating behavior and a trust that others will reciprocate.
Geoffrey Britain:
In what way do you consider it facile? It is a comprehensive mathematical description of the human system. I only left out the inputs (i.e. internal, external, and indeterminate) which affects its states and transitions. It is not simple at all. In fact, it is extraordinarily complex.
The duality is captured in a weighted vector constellation. As I have yet to learn of an experiment capable of distinguishing between origin and expression, any proper characterization of the human system must consider both. Either way, it is observed as an emergent property.
The only conservative to progressive changers I know of are David Brock who heads Media Matters, and of course, Andrew Sullivan. Many people question whether either of these two were ever really conservative, but they did identify themselves as such at one time.
n.n,
We are more than the sum of our parts. The ‘human system’ cannot be described mathematically in a comprehensive manner. As, illustration, please describe adequately, in mathematical terms, the profound state of love. Or it’s opposite, hate.
When elocution is used in a manner lacking in clarity it generally indicates a lack of understanding on the communicators part. Put another way, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Albert Einstein
J.J.,
Arguably, Brock caved in the face of opposition from other liberal pundits. Since, to my knowledge he hasn’t offered a logically consistent, rational explanation of what led to his abandonment of conservative principles, I wonder whether a downturn in readership influenced his ‘conversion’.
Sullivan was conservative until the Bush administration’s position on gay marriage led him to his current position, which is that conservatism in America is in the grip of religious fundamentalism…
GB: “Sullivan was conservative until the Bush administration’s position on gay marriage led him to his current position, which is that conservatism in America is in the grip of religious fundamentalism…”
So, it is Sarah Palin’s relgious beliefs that have turned him into one of the primary Palin detractors? He is obsessed with hating her. There’s more going on with him than just the gay marriage thing, methinks. Some say he has AIDS and it’s affecting his judgment. I confess I have no idea why he changed, but it seems like more than just gay marriage.
Brock’s bio at Wiki is kind of revealing. He was a “notorius right wing hit man” in the 90s. When he did a middle of the road book on Hillary (THE SEDUCTION OF HILLARY RODHAM) in the early 2000s many conservatives attacked him or dropped him as a friend because he was not sufficiently tough on Hilllary. He was outed as being gay and that seems to have driven him leftward for revenge of a sort. Anyway, he is a pretty “notorious left wing hit man” now.
J.J.: I read David Brock’s book Blinded By the Right when it came out in 2002, when I was still a Democrat, although my “change” was in the works at the time. It struck me that he was an empty person with almost no convictions at all, whether he was on right or left. He was an opportunist, pure and simple. His explanation of why he was a conservative in the first place made very little sense and didn’t seem to depend on much thought; likewise for his conversion to the left. A very odd and unusual person, of very little principle.
n.n.’s concept of a “constellation of weighted vectors”, if I understand it, rings true for me. It seems to me the number of characteristics on the lib/con continuum are so vast it would be terribly challenging to define and study them. The left/right brain argument is appealing, too, because it seems that most of the truly gifted actors, visual artists, and popular music artists are liberals. I don’t know, but I wonder, if the same is true of classical musicians.
I’ve been fascinated by the possibility of the Myers-Briggs temperaments bringing some light to the lib/con origins. Being a “P” — someone who tends to want to continue taking in new information before deciding (one way of looking at it) — means to me that, although liberal, my temperament forced me to look at new facts even though they weren’t comfortable at the time. Even as a conservative, I find myself continually reconfiguring my conservative philosophy.
People who’ve made the change seem different to me from those who’ve always been conservative. I feel that we tend to be more passionate about it because in many cases it was so painfully hard won.
I don’t think we can overlook the role prosperity plays in the making of liberals. I’m pretty sure you wont find nutjobs living in an african village who want to force their neighbors into smaller huts in order to save the planet.
Study of evolutionary and developmental biology (known also as evo/devo science) convinced me in two things: every trait, morphological or behavioral alike, always has some genetic and some environmental component. But this aside, in humans there is also the most important thing usually overlooked by biologists and sociologists: the free will. Chinese understand this right. They have a proverb: you sow an act and harvest a habit; you sow a habit and harvest a trait; you sow a trait and harvest a destiny. But, alas, free will is exactly what makes scientific study in these matters impossible, because it runs against presumption of causality inherent in every scientific study. So let keep science out of this moral and philosophical discussion, because it is blind and incompetent in any humanitarian problem. Social science is oxymoron, a junk science and charlatanism. No hope it will ever improve beyond this.
I’m torn on this issue. On one hand, I find liberal attempts to “pathologize” conservatives and conservative ideas very very creepy indeed.
But at the same time I do find myself wondering, because liberalism sometimes looks like a mental illness to me . . .
Any research into the subject would tell you more about the political beliefs of the researchers than the subjects, so perhaps this is a topic we should just agree to drop.
neo,
Agreed that Brock is apparently an opportunist. He seems to enjoy savaging people. Whether from the right or left depends on which side strokes his ego properly. An analogy might be a bisexual who chooses partners depending on the amount of ego gratification provided. No real loyalty – only goes where he gets the most strokes. I wonder what percentage of humans are this way?
Argh! I tried reading that article and just couldn’t get past the first page – it is such nonsense.
Trimegistus says exactly how I feel about this:
” . . . attempts to “pathologize” conservatives and conservative ideas [are] very very creepy indeed.”
Very well put!
However, I do not see liberal and conservative as being “set in stone.”
I do believe there was a time when liberal truly meant open-minded and subject to change; whereas nowadays I see so many who call themselves liberal being very set against new ideas. The same was once true of conservative; except it was the opposite.
So, Neo, here’s my question for you:
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan – Did you leave liberalism or did liberalism leave you?
Jonathan Haidt is really good on this, and has a new book out.
From http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html:
“In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at http://www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans.”
It’s hard to leave this subject alone! I see liberalism as another kind of faith, grounded in hope. While conservatism is more likely to be associated with religious faith, it is also more tied to practical solutions based on observed previous outcomes. So that’s my bias.
>>> in mathematical terms, the profound state of love. Or it’s opposite, hate.
While I concur with your basic thesis, this comparison is inaccurate, as many before me have noted on the subject.
Love and Hate are both proximately similar emotions, both being based on a somewhat obsessive focus on a single individual, group, or credo. The only distinction really between the two is if the obsession is a positive or negative one.
No, the actual “opposite” of love/hate is apathy: “My lack of interest in the subject/object borders on the supernatural”.
“If it ceased to exist, I would not care. If it was wildly successful, I would not care. As a matter of fact, if no one ever mentioned its existence to me ever again, I would likely never ever waste a fraction of a moment’s thought on it.”
THAT is the true opposite of love/hate.
>>> I’m pretty sure you wont find nutjobs living in an african village who want to force their neighbors into smaller huts in order to save the planet.
No, they’re a lot more likely to want to force their neighbors into smaller huts in order to provide themselves with a bigger hut.
😀
In the modern context, liberals are not liberal. They are leftist. Conservatives are generally free-market capitalists. Why do some people prefer a large role for the state? Maybe it’s related to the perception that the left is ‘cooperative’ and the right is ‘competitive.’ The left thinks imposing ‘sharing’ works and is a sign of an advanced civilization. The right understands that the freedom to adapt at the level of the individual is important to having a thriving and stable society. It is the right that is pro-evolution and the left that is trying stupidly to dictate outcomes.